his eyes. He turned back to the box of Lego and rummaged through it, making ostentatious noise.
‘We should go quite soon, I think,’ Annie continued. ‘We’ll have to go into town on the tube.’
Thomas sat back on his heels, but with his head still bent over his model. He turned it to and fro, looking carefully at it.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he said.
Benjy’s eyes went from one to the other. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he echoed. ‘Not at all.’
They had set themselves solidly against her, by instinct, closing their ranks against the stranger their mother tried to push forward as a friend. Annie was convinced that their refusal was absolute.
They’re eight years and three years old, she tried to tell herself. You’re adult, and their mother. You can persuade them. Bribe them, force them.
For Steve’s sake? For her own? Not for their own, she was certain of that.
She went across and knelt beside Tom. ‘Why don’t you want to go?’ she asked gently. ‘You’ve been telling me for weeks that you must see this film.’
She had thought, not carefully enough, that their eagerness for it would carry all of them through the first meeting. And after that, then it would be easier.
Thomas raised his eyes again, and the adult awareness in them made her feel cold.
What am I doing to my kids? she thought.
‘I want to see the film with Dad,’ he told her clearly. ‘It’s about space. Dad likes things like that.’
‘Me too,’ Benjamin said. ‘I want to see the film with Dad.’
Annie took a breath, trying to smile. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave the film for Dad. Shall we just go and have lunch with Steve?’
Thomas flung the Lego back into the box. His face went dull red, as it always did when he was upset. And then he shouted at her, ‘I don’t want to. I don’t like Steve. I won’t go. Benjy won’t either.’
Annie was shaking. It wasn’t any use insisting to Tom, You don’t know Steve. He did, of course. From half-heard fragments of his parents’ angry talk, from the unhappy silence of the house, and from his own fearful unconscious, Tom had made up his own picture of Steve. He knew the threat was close, and he had responded to it in the only way he knew.
As she knelt there Annie saw, with perfect clarity, how it would be.
There would be months, probably years, of times like this one. As she watched Thomas’s red face and Benjamin’s bewildered one she felt the pain of their divided loyalties, the sharpening of their premature awareness. There would be the ugly battles over their custody. Martin would fight her, lent strength by his bitterness, she was certain of that. She knew, as vividly as if she had already lived through them, what the bleak Sunday visits with the boys would be like, what they would be like for Martin, whichever of them won whichever portion of their children’s lives.
Was her own happiness worth that? This strange, exotic happiness since the bomb, that seemed increasingly to belong to another woman altogether? What was Steve’s happiness worth? She saw his face, every line of it clear, and she knew that she loved him, and the hurt stabbed like a knife inside her.
At last she stood up, stiffly, with pain in her chest and across her shoulders.
‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘That’s all right. You needn’t come, if you don’t want to. I have to go, because I promised I would. I’ll call Audrey, and ask her if she can come and look after you, just for a little while.’
The boys sat in silence while she telephoned.
‘Audrey?’ Annie said. ‘I know I’ve asked you too many favours lately. This is the last, I promise.’
‘You want me to come in to the boys?’
Audrey, Annie thought, with her grown-up daughters and her grandchildren, and her morose husband. Has Audrey got what she wants? Is she like Tibby? Annie’s face felt hot, and her eyes were bright and hard.
‘Just for an hour or two, this morning.’
‘Of course I will, my love. I’d be glad to. Gets me out of the house, doesn’t it?’ While they waited for her, the three of them sat in a circle round the Lego box, pretending that they were playing together. It wasn’t until he heard Audrey at the gate that Tom said hastily, anxiously, ‘Is it all right, Mum?’
‘I’ll make it all right,’ she promised him. Whatever it costs.
Audrey was in the hallway. ‘Only me,’ she called out to them, as she always did. Annie went over and put the kettle on. ‘Hello, Audrey. Shall I make you a cup of tea before I go? It’s kind of you to help out yet again.’
Audrey looked at her, shrewd under her perennial headscarf. ‘You go on, love. Do what you like, while you still can.’
Annie turned away with the kettle heavy in her hand. ‘This is the last time,’ she whispered.
When Audrey was furnished with her tea in her special china cup and saucer, Annie put her coat on. She didn’t stop to look at herself, and Audrey had to call after her, ‘Your collar’s all caught up at the back.’ She came after her and straightened it, motherly. ‘Are you all right, my pet?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said quickly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ From the doorway she looked at Benjy and Tom. They were absorbed in their game now. She had told them that she would make everything right, hadn’t she?
‘Bye,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Bye,’ Thomas said absently, not looking up. Ben didn’t make any response at all. Only Audrey said again, ‘You do what you want, Annie. Don’t worry about us.’
She almost laughed at that. The sound of it, beginning in her head, was hideous.
Annie had no memory of how she reached Steve’s flat. She was aware that it took a long time, and that she was afraid that her resolve would desert her. But at last she was riding up in the mirrored lift. She stared down at her feet rather than confront her own reflection.
When he opened the door she looked straight into his eyes.
‘I can’t do it,’ Annie said.
He took her arm, led her inside and closed the door. The black sofa in front of her was too close, too comfortable. Annie broke awkwardly away and sat on an upright chair.
‘What can’t you do?’ Steve asked her.
Nothing, she wanted to say. There’s nothing I can’t do, so long as I’m with you. Her vacillating spirit shamed her. Outside, a long way beneath the windows, Annie could hear the traffic. The sound was incongruous high up in the enclosed room.
‘I can’t leave them,’ Annie said. The words hurt, as if they were pulled out of her like splinters.
Steve turned his face away. After
